Being & Caring: Chapter 3

SELF-DETERMINATION AND AUTHENTICITY

“Our culture has taught us to value being self-determining: making our own choices about important events in our lives rather than having those choices made for us by others. That value is expressed in our desire to be authentic: to speak and act as who we truly are rather than shaping all our responses to fit other people’s expectations.

Each of us can learn to trust our own sense of what means most to us and accept it as our guide as we seek to find our own direction. To express yourself as you are, with minimal pretense, allows for a less stressful and more satisfying life. When I’m stating clearly what I want, I’m likely to be decisive and direct. I’m in touch with my strength – and so are you.

“A friend is a person who leaves you with all your freedom intact but obliges you to be fully what you are.” In that spirit, in being authentic, I don’t want to intrude on your authenticity.

Listen to the entire chapter as read by The Happy President from the book Being & Caring: A Psychology for Living by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz below.

Being & Caring: Chapter 2

ENJOYING LIFE: FROM JUDGMENT TO APPRECIATION

“We all have the capacity to enjoy life. We can find ways to enjoy what we do.

What else have we got to do that’s more important than learning how to be good to ourselves – and to those around us? How fully we enjoy our lives is dependent on our self-esteem: how we feel about ourselves and perceive our value to others.

As I pass judgment, I separate myself from others.

Here and now, I’m a perfect me, and you’re a perfect you. No one in the world can be as perfect as You as You are.”

Listen to the entire chapter as read by The Happy President from the book Being & Caring: A Psychology for Living by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz below.

Being & Caring: Chapter 1

PERSONAL EVOLUTION

“Each of us becomes more of who we can be in part by being fully who we are now.

Finding ways to enjoy and appreciate ourselves, those around us, and our interactions with the circumstances of our lives is part of what might be called personal wisdom – something as unique as your fingerprints, signature, or way of laughing.

When I’ve learned to stand on my own feet, I’m ready to move toward you and with you.

I need to find a way to feel all right about what I do.”

Listen to the entire chapter as read by The Happy President from the book “Being & Caring: A Psychology for Living” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz below.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Six

“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER SIX: THE STRUCTURE OF AWARENESS

My awareness if my life. It is the source of my survival. My lack of awareness is my limit, and could mean my end.

Developing our awareness means learning to live in contact with our own experience. We can easily be so caught up in what we’re doing that we don’t realize how we’re doing it. “The question at stake,” declared Epictetus, “is this: Are we in our senses, or are we not?”

WHAT AWARENESS IS – AND ISN’T

Awareness is the sensing of what exists, how it exists, and where and when it exists – its internal and external context. In contrast to knowledge, which is a file cabinet of information we learned in the past, awareness involves present sensing, along with thinking about how present events connect with other aspects of our lives. Just as our direct experience becomes more meaningful when we connect it with the rest of what we know, many educators now are realizing that we learn much more when our thinking occurs in a context of experiencing.

Zen teachers speak of developing a mirror mind that can reflect whatever image falls upon it clearly and without distortion or interpretation.

With awareness, often you don’t need to “figure out” why something is happening. Instead, as you become more aware of your actions and reactions, you begin to discover answers to some of your questions. The evens inside you may just need time to emerge.

What happens with awareness is unpredictable. That’s both the delight and the frustration of discovery.

Full awareness is possible only when seeing, hearing, or grasping the truth is more important than getting something else I want. Otherwise I distort my awareness in the service of my wants.

It’s important to note that self-awareness is totally different from “self-consciousness.” In self-consciousness, as the term is popularly used, a small bit of my attention goes to noticing what I’m doing or how I look. Mostly I’m worrying about what others are thinking about me. Mark Twain observed that others do very little of that kind of thinking, so relax. Just note that if you start to feel self-conscious, it’s a signal to pull your attention out of projective thinking and into active observing.

DEVELOPING OUR AWARENESS

Developing our awareness involves learning to observe the process rather than getting lost in directing it. Otherwise we end up repeating again and again the same old cycles of thought, emotion, or behavior. When we become aware, we can rely on the wisdom of our organism.

There’s essential value in learning to be aware of the obvious.

Awareness and Self-Acceptance

Awareness and self-acceptance are reciprocal. In my fullest awareness I am seeing, hearing, and feeling what is…including my judging of people, events, and things as “bad” or “wrong,” which usually colors or tints my awareness.

When I observe and I accept what I do, think and feel as the way I am now, including my judging behavior as “right” or “wrong,” I can perceive what I”m doing most clearly. Only when I’m aware of what I”m doing do I have the option of doing something else. The exciting paradox is that by accepting and acknowledging myself as completely all right just as I am now, at this instant in my life, new discoveries and directions become available.

Gestalt therapist Stella Resnick elaborates on this process: “When people first start out in therapy…frequently…they are afraid to see themselves because they think they won’t like what they see. They are judging themselves, and this judging is experienced with pain…Witnessing without judging…[reduces] internal conflict and self-victimizations…Growth comes not through goals of unrealistic perfection, but out of a place of inner support and self-love.”

The important even is your observation of what you’re doing, on the inside and the outside, whatever that is.

ATTENTION AND DISTRACTION

Attention is focused awareness. Bare attention is attention on here-and-now events. It involves two elements: an ability to concentrate – to focus my attention where I want it – and an attentiveness to what is happening in the moment.

Zen masters speak of one-pointed attention – focusing on just one thing at a time. For instance, when I watch a sunset, I’m just watching the sunset, not doing anything else. Our ordinary consciousness, however, is many pointed. As I watch the sunset, my attention darts back and forth between first this thought and then that one. Indeed, most of my attention may go into mental processes that keep me out of my here-and-now sunset.

Gestalt psychologists speak of the figure-ground phenomenon. I can drive down a street many times and never notice a certain mailbox. It’s just part of the background or “ground” against which other things stand out. But suppose I want to mail a letter. Now the mailbox leaps out at me. Suddenly it is the “figure,” and everything else become the “ground.”

Interest and Attention

What I’m aware of depends not only on what’s happening, but also on what I choose to pay attention to. Perls comments, “The pictures or sounds of the world do not enter us automatically, but selectively. We don’t see; we look for, search, scan for something. We don’t hear all the sounds of the world, we listen.”

I’m likely to become fragmented and out of touch with myself if I habitually respond to the stimuli that bid for my attention, instead of listening and searching. I stay more centered and more in touch with my aliveness when I actively choose what I attend to. My interest creates the meaning I find in a situation.

Distraction

I want to feel free to ask you to repeat what you said if I didn’t quite understand it. And I want you to ask me to rephrase if you didn’t hear what I said. If we agree on these two things, we’ll hear each other ore often.

Attention in Everyday Tasks

In his intriguing book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1976), Robert M. Pirsig describes how several principles of awareness and attention can be applied to exacting, demanding jobs.

First, assume an attitude of modesty. The higher your opinion of yourself, Pirsig says, the less likely you are to admit that you’ve goofed on something and the more likely you are to ignore facts that turn up.”

Pirsig’s second principle is for those whose anxiety stops them from getting started. Read ever book and magazine you can about how to do the repair job, he suggests. “Remember, too, that you’re after peace of mind – not just a fixed machine. And think the job through before you start to work: You can save time and trouble later by listing everything you’re going to do on little slips of paper and then reorganizing the sequence as you think about the job.

The third principle is: When you’re bored, stop. Boredom means your mind is wandering elsewhere. That’s when we make mistakes.

Pirsig’s fourth principle – Impatience is a great cause of mistakes. One cause of impatience is underestimating how long the job will take. Pirsig’s solution is to allow an indefinite time for the job and to double the allotted time when circumstances force time planning.

A fifth Pirsig principle is that “overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.”

Finally, the sixth useful Pirsig principle is called “mechanic’s feel.” Mechanic’s feels involves attending carefully to the material I’m working with – its softness or hardness, its elasticity, and what it tells me about how it wants to be handled.

Boredom

Boredom is a de-energizing of my attention. It can function as a useful statement about what I’m doing. It can identify something I don’t want to hear. In any event, it can be a way I torture myself and deaden my life.

I most often feel bored when I try to pay attention to something that doesn’t interest me right then. My options may include finding something interesting in it, changing what’s happening, drifting off into my own world of thoughts and fantasies, or leaving. I don’t have to poison myself by staying bored.

That “poison” can be real and deadly. For instance, you’ve probably known old people who died not long after retiring, or who died shortly after their spouses. Others in similar situations find interests that nourish and sustain them.

When you and I are talking, if I’m not interested in what’s happening, I can change it. I do you no favor by pretending that I”m interested in what you’re saying when I”m not. That poisons us both. When I”m listening because I think I “should,” I feel dead or resentful, and you and I make little contact.

As I develop my ability to be interested in wherever I am and whomever I’m with, I’m less at the mercy of circumstances and I have less need to be “entertained.”

EMPTINESS

Our capacity to be aware is hindered if our minds are too full.

Our culture encourages us to be too busy – to fill our consciousness with as many things and activities as we can. Space that isn’t filled with things and time that isn’t filled with action can seem threatening.

Sometimes people in counseling report sensing a sort of frightening black hole or deep pit inside them. So they grab for whatever they can, hanging on desperately so they won’t “fall in.”

Fritz Perls encouraged people who experience such feelings to let go – to go ahead and plunge into the darkness, being attentive to what they observe and feel. Again and again people find that when they get past their panic, they attain a valuable experience of their interior worlds. Perls spoke of the emptiness that we sometimes so fear as a fertile void that hold important keys to change.

There may be times when you feel the kind of frustrated emptiness in which nothing seems to have much meaning, and you get an uneasy feeling of something wrong because you lack defined activity or direction. At such times we need to remember that a pause in a person’s life is seldom an accident. It can be a time of many possibilities. When you nothing to do is a good time to do your nothing.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Five

“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER FIVE: CHOICE AND RESPONSIBILITY

When I pay attention to how my actions affect other people, I open the door to making the world around me more agreeable and a little more benevolently disposed toward me.

Each of us is touched by the effects of almost everything we do. We create a web of opportunities and obstacles for ourselves. Our temperaments, early learnings, and environments provide materials, but we ourselves are the architects, general contractors, carpenters, and stonemasons of our lives. We choose what to build and how to build it – as local representatives of the Karmic Construction Company.

RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-SUPPORT

Ordinarily the word responsibility is synonymous with “accountability.” But there’s another equally important meaning. Perls separates the word into two parts: response-ability. In this often forgotten dimension, it means the ability to respond, to be alive, to feel, to be sensitive. It doesn’t just mean “obligations” or “duty” – especially not in the sense of something I’ve been directed to do without involvement, so that I do it automatically, without thinking – like a robot rather than a person. Growth in these terms is a move from letting others be responsible for me to taking responsibility for myself.

A relationship is enriching and satisfying when both people share the responsibility for clearly stating what they want and sharing what they have to give. Keeping a person dependent can cause hostility.

When I assign the cause of my behavior to you, to my “unconscious,” to my parents or my past, I make it difficult for me to change. I f my parents did it to me, they’re the ones who must undo it if it’s to be undone. If they’re gone out of my life, presumably I’m stuck with what they did: “It’s all their fault.”

Recognizing my responsibility for myself doesn’t mean I have to give up being any way I am, or doing anything I do. It does mean that I need to stop believing that I act in these ways only because of my ancient history. Each day I choose to act in the ways I do.

Responsibility and Authenticity

Responsibility and freedom are related to self-determination and authenticity. I can be authentic only to the degree that I make my own choices about who I am and what I do = including choosing those times when I’m willing to go along with what others want for me.

“What is not possible is not to choose…If I do not choose, I am still choosing.” Sartre.

To forget that I discover, create, and maintain the conditions of my life leads to alienation – the feeling that I have no control over my own destiny, that I”ma pawn moved by the hands of the unseen “They” who sit in seats of power. But as I regain my sense of being the doer, the thinker, the feeler, my life becomes my own and I reclaim the power that is rightfully my own.

The Effects of Our Social Environments

Each of us is born in a historical period, a race, a culture, a rich family or a poor one, and a neighborhood. No matter what personal transformations we undergo, these elements are part of our personal history.

But there is a difference between speaking of responsibility for our life situation and responsibility for how we are in our life situation. I have a choice about how I wish to be in that situation. Within the limits set by my environment, I can choose how I let the forces around me influence me. Deliberately or by default, I can select the way I am wherever I am.

Next time you watch TV, be sensitive to how the program or commercial manipulates your thoughts and feelings. Much of that is intentional, with objectives different from your own. You’re making all those things you watch, read, and listen to part of your existence. With them, and with other places where you spend your time, you can ask yourself “Do I want to make that part of me?” This question has both a personal and a political aspect: “How am I affected by my environment?” and “What’s in it for my environment to have me accept the messages it’s giving me?”

Many of our social institutions seem to want me to be available for ready manipulation. If I feel inadequate about making my own decisions, I give up my power, my responsibility, and my right to define who I am to big business, the media, government agencies, and other influential groups. As I discover how my social environment wants me to be, and why, I can more wisely choose with of its elements I want to incorporate into my life and which I don’t.

ACTIONS AND EXPERIENCE

To others, I am what I do and say. My acts, and how others view them, define me in my world. To myself, I am also what I think and feel – my intentions and urges that determine my actions.

I Am What I Do

Jean-Paul Sartre’s distinction between an action and an attribute. “Six feet tallness” and “tableness” are attributes. They can’t be changed. “Bravery” is different. It’s based on actions. There’s no such thing as a “brave man,” declares Sartre. If a man usually acts bravely, that’s all we can say. To others, his acts define him: “Man is…nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.”

I choose how I want to be. My authenticity depends on it. I create ways of thinking and feeling about myself. No matter how I may claim that my deeds don’t represent me, in fact they do. Though I may claim that I can’t act otherwise, in fact I can.

I Am What I Experience

To hear from you how your world is for you can be very different from defining how you are in my terms. Such a knowing opens dialogue and provides new access to each other.

Both our observable actions and our inner experiences are related to other currents in our personalities, conscious and unconscious, to which we now turn.

Intention and Volition

With our intentions we formulate our values, construct our behavior, and define our ways of approaching or withdrawing to get or be what we want. In their theory of positive intent, Luthman and Kirshenbaum point to a deep level of intentionality in which we want to be secure, to feel good, to love and be loved, and to express ourselves in our own ways.

It’s useful to distinguish the act of forming an intention from the act of carrying it out. How commonly we say of someone, “He has good intentions, but…” So I define intention as conceiving of, at some level of awareness, what I wish to do; and volition as mobilizing the energy to carry out an intention and doing so.

Unconscious Choices and Intentions

When my intentions and volitions derive from a fuller dialogue with myself, I’m less likely to do things today that I’ll regret tomorrow. I’m more likely to do things that in accord with my own nature – and that are responsive to the needs of others in my world. Then my subconscious me and my conscious me start to talk to each other, get along better, and use each other’s resources.

WHAT’S DONE TO ME AND WHAT I DO

Do you promise yourself that “someday” you’ll work on things you need to work on in your life? Do you expect someone else – a psychologist, social worker, friend, or minister – to solve your problems for you? Do you let the expectations of people in your past define what you can and can’t do for yourself today?

What do you need to do to be good to yourself? How do you avoid asking yourself that question? Once you’ve asked it, how do you answer? By avoidance, or by doing something for yourself? How is avoidance a way of doing something for yourself?

When I trace my problems back to their source, it almost always turns out that, in some way, I chose them. If I apologize for being alive, people will treat me as though I have no right to be here. And if I ask for something as though I don’t expect to get it, the chances are I won’t.

The way I ask a question tells the other person what kind of answer I expect. I can ask for something in a way that makes it easy to reply.

In my daily life, I can give myself at least as much consideration as I give others. I don’t have to set myself up to be a victim.

Whatever I’m doing, I’m creating a whole mood, whether it be a vigorous, lively one, or a shoulder-slumping droopiness. If I look pugnacious, I’ll probably intimidate some people and get into fights with others. If I come on like a doormat, I’m likely to get walked on. My way of presenting myself crates the context for my relationships.

Blaming Others

How often and how automatically many of us place responsibility outside ourselves when something goes wrong: “It wasn’t my fault!” “I couldn’t help it!” Democrats and Republicans do it all the time.

As long as I defend where you attack and blame, you control the action. I’m on the defensive. But I can protect myself against your blaming, and others’, by remembering that I am not obliged to accept anyone else’s evaluation of me. As counselor Norman Brice points out, When I depend on what others think of me, I’m vulnerable to being made to feel bad by every ill-dispositioned person I happen to meet. “There are few of us,” says Brice, “who have the presence of mind to say, ‘Oh no! That’s your truth. That’s not the truth!”

Self-Blame

When I acknowledge some of my responsibility for my own troubles, I can no longer use my presumed “helplessness” or “inadequacy” to distract myself from doing anything to change. I can tell myself, “I got into this; now I can get out of it and into a situation I’ll feel better about.”

Mistakes are familiar mice in everybody’s cornfield. If I think as clearly and act as honestly and wisely as I can, that’s enough. We can decrease our self-aggravation and suffereing by learning to take our mistakes, failures, and half-successes as a “texture” in our lives. My “errors” and “defeats” sometimes teach me more than my successes. In that important sense they aren’t failures at all.

What’s Yours and What’s Mine

In most cases, what happens between you and me results from what we both do. You anger yourself, feel hurt, feeld good, etc., in response to my words and actions. I can’t, all by myself, make you angry, hurt your feelings, or make you feel good. You’ve got to be willing to use my input to go to one of those places. Usually, the most I can do is create the situation.

In the many instances when I don’t know how you’ll respond to what I say or do, however, I take responsibility only for my wants and actions. I have no responsibility for – or control over – your response.

Likewise, how I feel in response to what you do is my own doing – not yours. Even when I have ot deal with difficulties you cause me, it’s within my power to maintain a creative state of mind. I don’t have to get in my own way by making myself miserable and thereby making life even harder.

ONLY I CAN DO IT

A monk asked: “How does one get emancipated?” The master said: “Who has ever put you in bondage?” – D.T. Suzuki

We often say, “I can’t,” when the truth is, “I won.t”

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Four

“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER FOUR: INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION: PULLING OURSELVES TOGETHER

The old German word Gestalt, passed on to us by the Gestalt psychologists early in this century, means “form, pattern, whole, configuration.” It has to do with how the parts of something fit together as a consistent whole – or fail to do so.

Similarly, if I’ve found ways for the elements of my personality to live together comfortably, in a relatively “integrated” fashion. I can know the different parts of me and have them available when I need them. Otherwise I’m somewhat “disintegrated,” like to keep parts of myself out of my awareness and to work hard to avoid perceiving how my different sides conflict.

BECOMING A WHOLE PERSON

There are two ways to view being whole. In one, we are all by definition whole: Somewhere in this mind-body-spirit being that I call “me,” everything that’s part of me exists, available to me when I find a way to get to it.

To the degree that I’m in contact with all of myself, I am whole in the second sense of the word: I have the many sides of me available when I need them.

In both our older and newer parts, there are places where we don’t let our life energy flow: thoughts we stop ourselves from thinking, emotions we stop ourselves from feeling, and actions we stop ourselves from taking. Perls spoke of those places as “holes in the personality,” aspects of ourselves that we don’t allow ourselves to recognize or experience. Each contains a dimension of myself that’s lost to me as long as I keep that part of me “off limits”.

My personal power and inner richness becomes available as I reopen and “reown” the disowned parts of myself. An important element of this is having and using alternatives – diverse ways to deal with myself, people, and events. Such alternatives emerge, in part, from recognizing my most habitual way of responding. That awareness opens other possibilities.

Freud drew attention to a process that functions like an “internal executive” to determine which parts of us can express themselves when, and how. It “tests reality” – checking out what’s real and what isn’t, so we don’t make unnecessary mistakes.

This is ego function, not to be confused with the pop usage of the word in which we say someone “has a big ego” or “is egotistical,” meaning the person thinks himself or herself more important or “better” than other people.

Freud used ego as one of the principal actors in his psychic drama. There is id, or the processes of responding to hunger, thirst, aggression, and sexuality; ego, which serves as the mediator between id forces and the restraints and constraints of outside reality; and superego, a conscience that “includes…the rules and precepts handed down by parents and authorities and the ‘ego ideal’ fashioned by the individual, i.e. the kind of person he or she aspires to become…Like ego, the superego is but partly conscious.”

Now lets’ return to the other meaning of ego, where as Alfred Adler declared, “Man is but a drop of water…but a very conceited drop”. There are different elements of this kid of ego: Infantile ego is my process of saying “Am I getting enough?” A “no” response leads me to demand, “Me! Me! Me!” Image-based ego is my process of asking, “Am I good enough?” It isn’t present in early life but develops as the social self grows out of our perception of other people’s evaluations of us. One side of image-based ego is self-glorification. This is telling myself and others, and wanting others to tell me, how marvelous I am.

The other side of image-based ego is self-depreciation: telling myself how worthless I am and imagining that others see me that way too. Self-glorification and self-depreciation both grow out of my anxieties about my value, lovableness, or competence.

Feeling separate and isolated is an important part of infantile and image-based ego. I see how you and I are different, and how you may want to hurt me, but I have a hard time seeing how we are the same and how you care.

As I learn to take better care of my emotional needs and to value myself as I am, I feel less need to put others down, “win,” or seem “important” – and I more easily give what others need and get what I want.

THE SHADOW

According to mythology and superstition, a person without a shadow is the Devil himself – or herself. Even today, most people are cautious with someone who seems “too good to be true”. Knowing who we are involves facing our shadowy sides as well as our sunny ones.

Jung used the term shadow for our unacceptable and unacknowledged sides. Like Freud’s ego, shadow is not a “thing” but a process, a useful metaphor. It refers to the parts of us that we hide from our conscious mind – including desirable qualities that we’ve learned to think of as “not part of us” – and the way we hide them. As a guideline, the narrower the standards and definitions that govern our life, the more powerful our shadow side.

While shadow tendencies remain hidden, suggests Fordham (1966), they grow in strength and vigor, and when they burst through they may overwhelm the rest of the personality. One Half of you must understand the Other Half or you will tear yourself apart.”

Refusal to face myself can keep me stuck in repetitive, self-defeating patterns, since unconsciously I disavow other possibilities. Integration of feelings and form becomes the first order of business.

OUR INTERIOR DRAMA

The philosopher Martin Buber declared that wholeness depends on the quality of an individual’s dialogue with himself or herself (1971). We are each multiple, complex, and interdependent, like a collection of different people, or “characters,” living together in one body. When I have two of my characters fighting for control, I can both sabotage and torture myself.

DEVELOPING OUR UNDERDEVELOPED SIDES

Creativity exists when we find new ways of understanding relationships and relating to the world of things. It can occur at the easel, at the kitchen table, or at an insurance executive’s desk. Creativity includes perceiving and responding to the world anew, out of the “sense of wonder” – the ability to enter a situation and see it “as if for the first time.”

Jung’s Psychological Types

Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, and Intuiting.

Anima and Animus

Jung gave the names anima and animus to two groups of qualities that exist in the unconscious – anima in men and animus in women. The Adam and Eve story, he suggested, points to such a splitting-apart, and then to the continuing effort to find one’s other half and achieve again the primal unity we knew in the beginning.

Jung used the term anima for the presence in the male personality of a group of qualities often considered “feminine”: receptive, nurturing, soft, intuitive, drawing on the depths of the inner world and the unconscious.

Jung called another constellation of traits, those that often are part of a woman’s unconscious side, the animus: assertive, achieving, rational, problem solving, outgoing.

In a balanced personality, “masculine” and “feminine” elements intertwine. There aren’t really “two sides” at all, but a multiplicity of qualities that occur naturally in both men and women. I’m a many-sided being – and I need all of me.

Berne’s “Parent, Adult, and Child”

Psychiatrist Eric Berne (1961) described another polarity in each of us, which he calls our parent ego state and child ego state. As children, we were influenced to varying degrees by one or more adults.

When we reaming in touch with spontaneity, we can still be playful and childlike, even as adults. This is our natural child.

As my little professor, I figure out how things work and how to get what I want. I’m curious about and interested in everything.

My adapted child as learned ways to avoid punishment and get rewards. I may along with the demands on me or run away from them: I turn into a “withdrawn child” who is distant and unresponsive; a “rebellious child” who says “no” to almost everything; or a “compliant child” – a “good boy” or “good girl” who does everything I’m told to.

With our “inner parent” as with our “inner child.” we make choices about how we do and don’t want to act. If my parent nurtured and cared for me with great love and concern, my “parental” care-taking is likely to have some of those same qualities. We might call this my nurturing parent. If my parent gave many orders, punished me often, and was cold and distant, then I may express some of those qualities. We can call this my judgmental parent. Or if my parent smothered me with so much affection and protectiveness that I had a hard time learning to stand on my own feet, I may try to do too much for you and not encourage your self-determination. This is my overprotective parent.

Whatever my past, in my present I can move toward being less judgmental, less overprotective, and more nurturing in taking care of myself as well as my children. My rational adult is the part of me that has learned to deal with myself and my world as effectively as I can based on the information I have available. My emotional adult is the part of me that has learned to appreciate and live with my feelings.

THE MEDICINE WHEEL

“Each person is a unique Living Medicine Wheel, powerful beyond imagination, that has been placed up one this earth to Touch, Experience, and Learn. To the North on the Medicine Wheel is found Widsom…The South is the place of Innocence and Trust, and for perceiving closely our nature of heart…The West is the Looks-Within place, which speaks of the introsepctve nature of man…The East…is the place of Illumination, where we can see things clearly far and wide…” – Hyemeyohsts Storm in Seven Arrows.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Three

BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER THREE: SELF-DETERMINATION AND AUTHENTICITY

Our culture has taught us to value being self-determining: making our own choices about important events in our lives rather than having those choices made for us by others. That value is expressed in our desire to be authentic: to speak and act as who we truly are rather than shaping all our responses to fit other people’s expectations. Self-determination and authenticity are different sides of the same issue: Each requires the other for its full expression.

Each of us can learn to trust our own sense of what means most to us and accept it as our guise as we seek to find our own direction.

Relying upon anyone’s advice as to what you “should” or “shouldn’t” do will have you living borrowed pieces of other people’s lives instead of being responsible for your own life. No one is more suited to be you for you than you are.

When others respond with mistrust to my choices and actions, I can describe in the most caring way I know that I do appreciate their concerns and suggestions, but that as part of my own growth I have to be accountable to myself and to make certain decisions for myself. That may not “make everything all right,” but at least it opens the door to dialogue – especially when demonstrating my respect for them may help them to demonstrate greater respect for me.

Existentialist Martin Heidegger – “When we take refuge in the decisions of others it is not long before we think what others think, feel what others feel, and do what others do.”

Soren Kierkegaard used the term authenticity to refer to being in touch with our inner selves and acting from that full contact with who we are. To be authentic means to be true to myself. I cannot be authentic and put up a false front before others at the same time.

Being True To Ourselves

In each area of my life, I can ask, “How much room do I have to be myself in this situation? How much of the room I have do I use?”

It’s possible to be authentic when I’m not happy or comfortable as well as when I’m feeling good. When I’m lonely, for example, I don’t need to pretend that I’m not. If I reveal my loneliness to you, there’s at least a chance that we’ll touch each other in a way that has meaning for both of us. Even if we don’t, my attempt to communicate has intrinsic value. But if I keep silent when I want to tell you how I feel, we probably won’t make contact in more than a superficial way.

Steppingstones are significant turning points or periods in our lives – pleasant, painful, or neither – that brought us where we are today. They can help us recognize the “deeper than conscious” directions in which we move with our life currents.

Being authentic requires self-trust.

Being open with others can be frightening, for it increases my vulnerability and lessens my options for manipulation. In a way, I’m safer when you’re mystified by my cloaks, masks, and shadows, for then you seldom know just who or where I am.

If you and I are authentic with each other, we may become very close. The general principle is clear: To express yourself as you are, with minimal pretense, allows for a less stressful and more satisfying life.

Personal and Social Selves

Newborn infants have no roles to play. They just are, completely true to themselves. We could say that a newborn is entirely a personal self.

Conflict with and response to others lead to the beginnings of a social self. This early social self includes all of the personal self. Thus integrated, there’s nothing that the infant is unwilling to reveal to others.

The social self, or persona as Jung called it – a word that comes from the masks ancient Greek actors wore to symbolize the roles they played – serves two purposes: to make a specific impression on other people, and to conceal the inner self.

When people identify heavily with the persona and deny the rest of who they are, psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1969) speaks of a divided self.

We may stay locked into certain roles out of habit.

Each of us has the option to present ourselves in our social roles in ways that moves closer to who we are inside, so that our personal and social selves overlap more.

Acting As If

When I’m being authentic, I’m voicing my real wants and needs. When I’m concealing and manipulating, I’m testing you.

When I trust you to deal with me as I am, I communicate clearly who I am and what I want. When I act from the part of my social self that’s different from my personal self, I speak and act as if I’m thinking and feeling something other than I am.

When I’m stating clearly what I want, I’m likely to be decisive and direct. I’m in touch with my strength – and so are you.

Hypocrisy is a particular kind of as-ifery. It means being phony, presenting a public front of seeming to act in the service of higher principles than I really am. If I tell people I’m doing something because I want to help my community, or because it’s “the American Way,” when in fact my reason is because it helps my business or gives me a tax writeoff, I’m being hypocritical.

The Script

Psychiatrist Eric Berne speaks of the parental instructions we’ve received about how to act and be, and what to do with our lives, as our scripts (1961). Our scripts are also our own doing.

Until I realize that I’m acting out an obsolete script, I may be struck with some ineffective, unproductive, or even self-destructive behavior. When I follow a script that no longer fits me, I expend a lot of energy trying to bottle up the spontaneous flow of my life force. I don’t have to waste my energy in stopping myself. I can judiciously appraise where I have room to be myself in a fuller way and where I don’t.

HOW WE BECOME STRANGERS TO OURSELVES

Disconfirmation, Confirmation, and Pseudoconfirmation

Through my responses to what you do and say, I confirm or disconfirm your sense of who you are.

If significant others validate what you think, feel, and do, you’re encouraged to develop a secure, reliable sense of yourself. IF you get feedback that reinforces your own impressions, you learn to trust your ability to discern what’s going on around you. You’re likely to develop a clear sense of contact – of where you leave off and other people being, rather than becoming enmeshed in the sticky web of what Perls terms confluence, where you’re not sure of your boundaries.

But when others act in ways that deny y our actions and your perceptions of yourself and your world, you may become confused and uncertain about your identity. In order to keep the love and protection of significant others, you may choose to repress your questions and misgivings and agree with their insistence that they know you better than you know yourself.

What’s different about words and actions and confirm and those that disconfirm? A confirmatory response, say Laing, acknowledges your action – though it doesn’t necessarily agree with it. Disconfirmation, by contrast, has a tangential quality. My response appears to deal with your concern, but actually it deals with an aspect of the matter that concerns me – not the one that concerns you.

An especially subtle and fascinating process is that of pseudoconfirmation. This is pretense at confirmation, giving teh appearance of it without the substance. I tell you who you are, then I confirm my definition of you. I induce you to accept my ideas about you, then confirm your attempts to apply them to yourself.

“A friend is a person who leaves you with all your freedom intact but obliges you to be fully waht you are.” In that spirit, in being authentic, I don’t want to intrude on your authenticity.

Carl Rogers describes an attitude that he terms “unconditional positive regard,” which he defines as “an atmosphere with…demonstrates ‘I care’; not ‘I care for you if you behave thus and so’” (1961). This kid of acceptance is not so easy. It can take hard work to set aside my goals for you – what I want for you and what I think would be good for you – and leave you room to be yourself. But it opens the way for me to know you as you are.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Two

BEING AND CARING by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER TWO: ENJOYING LIFE: FROM JUDGING TO APPRECIATION

We all have the capacity to enjoy life. But instead we may act out old habits that darken our days and sabotage our hopes.

We can find ways to enjoy what we do. “There are over eight hundred ‘happy texts’ in the Bible. If God said that many times to be glad and rejoice, he must surely have meant it.” Learning to celebrate our existence in work, play, and relationship is both a religious and a spiritual charge.

Unless I’m living in a way that pleases me, my actions and projects are unlikely to nourish others. If you enjoy your own existence, your actions and undertakings are more likely to help others enrich their lives, too. What else have we got to do that’s more important than learning how to be good to ourselves – and to those around us? How fully we enjoy our lives is dependent on our self-esteem: how we feel about ourselves and perceive our value to others. High self-esteem, an attitude that includes self-respect and good feelings about ourselves, makes it easy to enjoy life. Low self-esteem, an attitude that includes feelings that we’re somehow wrong, bad, or inadequate, makes it harder.

A tragic irony is that if my own self-esteem is low, I may depreciate others so I can feel good by comparison: “At least I’m not as bad as you.” In doing that, I challenge their self-esteem.

Thus, self-esteem is a learned process that emerges from our social interactions. To a significant degree, it’s an estimate of how I perceive the people in my environment valuing me.

Listen to what you say to others. Does your comment seem to make the other person feel better or worse about himself or herself?

THE NATURE OF JUDGMENT

We all know the feeling many call “bitterness in our hearts.” When I feel this way, I tend to pass harsh judgment on whomever or whatever comes my way. As I pass judgment, I separate myself from others. These are depreciative judgments.

Evaluation, Preference, and Judgment

Our own judgments about what we do and don’t value provide us needed life-orientation and guidance. Constructive criticism of our ideas and undertakings gives us feedback about what’s useful and what isn’t. But we don’t have to transform the need for constructive appraisal into habitual rejection through judgment that can pervade our lives, interfere with our appreciation of ourselves, and demean the beauty in our world.

To clarify that distinction, when I have to make decision or choose among alternative, I call it evaluation. Evaluation is considering the effects of something: Is it helpful or harmful?

Liking or disliking, by contrast, is primarily a feeling process. I enjoy this more than that. When I pay attention to what I actually prefer now, I’m likely to respond more openly instead of staying locked into old habits.

Instead of saying, “I don’t like Brian,” I say, “Brian is a jerk” (he is, you know). Instead of stating my own feelings, I pretend, even to myself, that I’m responding to “the way things are.”

I use the term projective judgments for these feelings disguised as judgments. I assign my own feelings to some aspect of the person, thing, or event I’m judging instead of recognizing that they come from me. I define you in terms of what’s happening in me.

Accusations, condemnations, and rejection contribute to lo self-esteem in others and, when directed inward, maintain it in ourselves. When I let go of judgment in this sense, I open myself to a broader canvas of experience.

Habitual judging makes life brittle. Few things steal more vitality, or cast a chiller, darker mood, than the habit o criticizing and condemning.

We can think about the counsel Jesus offered: “Pass no judgement, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; acquit, and you will be acquitted; give and gifts will be given you…for whatever measure you deal out to others will be dealt to you in return.” (Luke 6:37-38, New English Bible)

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius commented, “Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them or bear with them”. When I feel an impulse to criticize people, I might first ask myself, “Am I willing to take the time to show them a better way to do it non-judgmentally so they’ll be willing to hear? Do I know a better way – really?”

Discovering What’s Beneath Our Judgments

When we don’t feel impelled ot respond to hostility with hostility, we’re apt to make better contact with people and resolve issues more effectively. Discriminate between evaluation and depreciation. I’m more likely to hear you when you tell me your feelings, or when you describe how you react to what I do, than when your words or voice imply that you’re better and I’m worse.

It is important that we acknowledge our humanity. I don’t have to pretend to be nonjudgemental about things I really do judge. As you feel the bitterness that lingers on in you, be gentle with yourself. If you forgive no one else, at least forgive yourself.

DISCOUNTING OURSELVES

Many people (not just those who chronically feel bad about themselves) disparage themselves, as much as – or even more than – they put down others.

How many times a day do you feel inferior? But ask yourself, inferior compared to what? Compared to what you might realistically expect to be and do, given your background and the breaks you’ve had? Of course not. That way you’d come out right where you are.

You can improve your skill at doing almost anything, once you get rid of your image of yourself as “no good at it.”

Here is one of the most important statements in this book: At this point in your life, at this moment in time, however you are, it’s all right for you to be that way. To feel what you feel, to think what you think, to do what you do. What is, is. What you are, you are. Recognizing that can make it easier to begin moving today in directions that will help you feel better about your life tomorrow.

“Shoulds”

Every depreciative judgment about myself has a “should” at its center. I “should” be a certain way, and if I’m not, I’m defective.

“Should”, as it’s widely used, carries a quality of absoluteness. The things I “should” are are right, and the things I “shouldn’t” do are wrong. And that’s that.

When my mind is filled with what I “should” have done, ordinarily I don’t find out as much about what happened as a result of what I did.

WORKING WITH JUDGMENTS

Monitoring depreciative judgments can decrease their frequency and intensity. The most reliable way to monitor your judgments is to count them.

SAYING “YES” TO OURSELVES

There are several alternatives to depreciative judgment. One is positive judgment. Another alternative is to appreciate something for what it is, without judging it as either good or bad.

The Theory of Positive Intent

Appreciating what’s going on involves two steps. 1) Recognizing what it is in our behavior that drives away the very response we want from others or that defeats us in other ways. 2) Recognizing that we don’t defeat ourselves because we’re bad, sick, stupid, or crazy, but when we don’t recognize and honor our own positive intent, nor that of others.

The theory of positive intent helps us take an apparently negative, destructive behavior and use it as a starting point for growth.

The Perfection in What Is

Perfection has two very different meanings. One is the gradual change from being “imperfect” to being “perfect.” The other is the perfection of each thing that exists, just as it is right now.

Here and now, I’m a perfect me, and you’re a perfect you. No one in the world can be as perfect as You as You are.

None of this means that we need to tolerate troublesome conditions in our lives that we can change. Instead, the task is to get in touch with exactly how things are not okay, and set out to remedy that.

Saint Theresa of Avila said it beautifully: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Since I have some choice about how I feel, I can feel hostile, angry, and bitter as I work to change harmful conditions, or I can feel full, alive, and in contact with myself and my world.

Art Hoppe, my favorite newspaper columnist, wrote one day, “If we all celebrated life, who could oppress or kill or hate his fellow man?”